« Michael Avenatti indicted on 36 counts, including embezzling millions from a paraplegic | Veterans' Old Deal »
April 12, 2019

Why is Ben Rhodes hell-bent on defending Ilhan Omar?

By Monica Showalter

Rep. Ilhan Omar, who trivialized 9/11 in a speech to the radical Muslim group CAIR and found herself rightly blasted by the New York Post on its front page yesterday, has a peculiar ally and defender.

Not just her usual cronies, nasty pieces of work such as Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  It's a given that they would defend her, they like the sorts of things she spews.  No, the noteworthy defender out there in her defense is President Obama's "mind meld," narrative master, and deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes.  Here are his tweets:

Defending her trivialization of 9/11 and attacking the New York Post instead is weird stuff, indeed, because Rhodes is also out there trying to make himself into a respectable foreign policy figure.  The bannerhead of his Twitter site is a shill for his foreign policy memoirs, and he announces various speaking engagements at major universities for students to learn from him at his knee.  The man who couldn't get a security clearance until President Obama intervened for him is trying to go legit.

Why would defending an out there extremist such as Omar, whose views are indefensible, be something that Rhodes would put his political capital to work at right about now? 

Rhodes has always been someone's pawn, so one wonders if maybe the Obama political machine is behind the effort to prop Omar up.  We know that Omar seems to have ties to Louis Farrakhan; it may just be that her ties also extend beyond him to the Obama political machine.  Obama, of course, had ties to Farrakhan of his own.

There were signs of Obama having Omar's back earlier, as these tweets signal — another close member of the Obama inner circle, Valerie Jarrett, took a stand for Omar after she took flak for Jew-hating tropes and statements.  See here:

It's rather suggestive of the idea that the Obama machine is protecting her, always there to defend her, no matter what she does.

Here's another thing: Omar doesn't retreat, no matter how big a mess she makes for herself.  She stands her ground the way Nicolás Maduro stands his ground in Venezuela and has quit apologizing for even the most egregious anti-Semitism and America-hatred.

There's one notable exception: when she badmouthed President Obama over drone use on terrorist-infested hellholes.

She beat a hasty retreat on that one, declaring, "I am an Obama fan!"

She then made the absurd claim that the difference between President Trump and President Obama was that President Trump is "not human."

That was the only thing she ever backtracked on with sincerity.  (She did make a half-hearted semi-apology after her first instance of anti-Semitism under political fire, but it was nothing like the backtrack she beat on the Obama matter.)

So there seems to be some Obama support mechanism out there, picking her up every time she falls flat on her face.

Why is Obama protecting her?

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com